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Final frontier awaits Voyagers 1 and 2

If there had been a party to celebrate the two NASA Voyager probes’ recent 35th birthday, the guests of honour wouldn’t have been able to make it.
That’s because the un-manned spaceships are 9 and 11 billion km away.
That’s 120 times farther away from the sun than the Earth is.
Voyager 2 was launched on Aug. 20, 1977, while Voyager 1 launched 16 days later, 35 years ago on Wednesday.
The two spacecrafts were launched and sent in the opposite direction from the sun to visit and collect data from the solar system’s outermost planets.
The probes have been close to the planets of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
The two probes have gone farther from Earth than any other object sent from this planet.
David Hanes, professor and head of the Queen’s University department of physics, engineering physics and astronomy, has been teaching his students about the probes over the years.
“The main objective when they sent it out was to visit the outer planets in the solar system,” he said. “Also to take pictures of the planets and their moons and send them back.”
Over the past 35 years, the probes have sent back a variety of information to NASA scientists, including close-up photos of the planets they’ve visited and other data.
Hanes said they’re still sending back information but no longer pictures.”
According to the NASA’s website, it takes 16 hours for information from the Voyagers to travel to mission control in Pas­adena, Calif.
The information they’re sending back includes the strength of the magnetic field and the energy of the charged particles they’re encountering out there.
“That’s kind of a bonus because that’s not part of the main objective of the program,” said Hanes. “Now they’ve just continued on their way, the two Voyagers, they’re coasting out of interstellar space.”
Or as NASA puts it: “Break on through to the other side.”
The two probes have travelled so far that within a few months or years, they’ll be out of this solar system. There’s no accurate date, said Hanes, but one day, probably in the 2020s, the two Voyagers will no longer be able to send back information.
Hanes said if the spaceships’ power supply dries up or if they get too far away, no more information can be picked up. “So I don’t know what comes first.”
Astronomers can now tell that the Voyagers are moving out of our solar system because of the different type of data being received from the probes.
“The numbers of charged particles, the directions they’re moving, the energy, the magnetic fields are a little different than they had been. That tells us that they’re moving away from the sphere of influence from the sun and out into the true interstellar space.
What makes the Voyagers’ ability to send information back to this day using 1970s computer technology is remarkable, said Hanes. He said that people today have more computer power in their smartphones than the 1960s’ Apollo moon rockets.
Hanes added the Voyagers’ computers were used to control a simple camera, a simple system to record the information and send it back to Earth.
“They actually used cassette tape recorders,” Hanes said. “If you were going to send a new probe tomorrow, you’d put in stuff that’s a million times better.”
Another feature of the Voyager probes is that they include information on Earth, our solar system and the human race just in case someone out there might see it.
There are two discs that look like vinyl records with encoded information on them that includes greetings in many languages and the music of Bach, Beethoven and the Beatles.
The discs were meant to be opened by “a clever technological society that could extract the information,” said Hanes. “The odds of that happening are just vanishingly small. It was more meant as a symbol than anything.
“Nobody realistically expects that to be picked up by extraterrestrials,” he added. “It’s just a small chunk of metal coasting through space. … There’s trillions of asteroids and no one would notice it to pick it up.
“There’s no realistic hope it’ll be found by anyone. It’s just a gesture.”